Joss Whedon

Born: June 23 1964 Where: USA

Long regarded simply as "the man who created Buffy", the writer/director has driven many more stakes into the entertainment industry’s heart than the vivacious vampire killer.

He took his A-levels at Winchester College in Hampshire, UK, before bagging a film degree from Connecticut’s Wesleyan University then heading west to Hollywood to seek his fortune.

Descended as he is from a line of highly regarded TV writers – his dad Tom scripted popular 70s hits like Benson, and his grandfather John penned 50s successes The Donna Reed Show and Leave It To Beaver – it was inevitable that Whedon would make his mark on a sitcom: Roseanne.

After the short-lived series Parenthood (which aimed to cash in on the hit Steve Martin comedy) came the first incarnation of Buffy The Vampire Slayer as a movie in 1992.

With Kristy Swanson in the title role, it was all good fun until the box office receipts came in.

But Whedon bounced back with the Toy Story screenplay, for which he earned an Oscar nomination.

He was also involved in the scripting processes for crowd-pleasers such as Speed, Twister and X-Men. (A big fan of the comic books, Whedon has written one himself - The Astonishing X-Men for Marvel.)

Then, in 1997, he got the chance to resurrect Buffy on TV. Over seven phenomenally popular series, Whedon became almost as big a star as his leading lady Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Buffy also opened doors for the rest of the cast, with Alyson Hannigan becoming American Pie’s flautist and Whedon creating a successful spin-off series for David Boreanaz’s character Angel.

His approach to screenwriting is to provide pure, tongue-in-cheek entertainment.

But there have been Whedon failures – Alien: Resurrection was widely regarded as a clunker and the sci-fi eco-adventure Titan A.E. did so badly it sank Fox’s animation department.

The sci-fi saga Firefly – Whedon’s next small-screen venture – came a cropper when the Fox network messed around with the schedule so much that episodes were aired out of sequence and nobody knew what in the cosmos was going on.

Imagine the Starship Enterprise with a few loose bolts and a Han Solo-like captain, and it’s not hard to see why the series became a cult favourite when it was released on DVD.

Encouraged by the sizeable fanbase, Whedon was able to conjure up Serenity, a feature-length adventure stirred from Firefly’s ashes. In his words:

“…the idea behind Serenity in the first place really did have to do with the idea of the Millennium Falcon as a real concept...forget the aliens and the robots and the force. What if you just had a crappy little spaceship and you had to make a living and you didn’t really care how?”

Strong word-of-mouth made the movie a badly needed success in the box office slump of summer 2005.

Whedon has promised that there will be Serenity sequels, and is currently working on Wonder Woman, set for a buxom, blockbusting return in 2007.